Five Sleazy Ways Professors Inflate Their Personal Metrics

There are two numbers used nowadays to judge the performance of a scientist: a paper count representing the number of papers published, and a citation count representing the number of citations such papers count (each such citation being a reference to a paper occurring in some other paper). There are five sleazy ways in which the modern scientist may attempt to increase these numbers.

Method #1: Author Inflation 

Over the decades there has been a phenomenon under which the average number of authors listed on a scientific paper has grown higher and higher. A paper this year states the following:

"Escalating author counts in science are a longstanding phenomenon. The average number of authors per published article has risen steadily for decades.  From the 1930s to the 1970s, the average number of authors on a published article was 2 and since then has escalated sharply.  Between 1970 and 2010, the number of articles with 6 to 10 authors increased more than 10-fold. By 2000, the average number was 7, and the number of articles with 11 to 20 authors increased more than 20-fold.  Multiauthorship (more than 10 authors) and hyperauthorship (more than 100 or even 1,000 authors) are now common."

What is going on is that more and more names are wrongly being listed as authors of scientific papers, so that scientists can brag about higher numbers of papers they authored.  The problem is referred to by the euphemistic term "author inflation," although it really should be plainly called "lying about authorship." Referring to metrics such as the number of papers a scientist has authored and the number of citations such papers have got, the same paper states, "The pressures from institutional metrics have spawned an entire ecology of academic misconduct and manipulation."

A 2015 anonymous article is entitled, "My professor demands to be listed as an author on many of my papers."  Describing a culture in which a type of deceit has been normalized, the author writes this:

"There’s one instance where it’s acceptable for scientists to lie: when fraudulently claiming authorship of a paper. Too often, researchers attach their names to reports when they have contributed nothing at all to the work. The problem gets worse the higher up the academic ladder you go."

This type of deceit works both ways. A scientist who had no real role in the production of a paper may pressure a junior scientist into adding him as an author. Or, the real author of the paper may add the senior scientist as an author, in hopes of increasing his chance of getting the paper published. 

A paper distinguishes between "gift authorship" and "guest authorship," both of which involve putting names on the author list of scientific papers when the people did not help write the paper:

"Gift authorship may involve reciprocating favors for previous co-authorships (quid pro quo), helping a colleague obtain tenure or promotion, for romantic favors extended, or to assist the graduate student who might have only provided minimal administrative assistance to assist the student’s job search. In some cases, a colleague’s name is added on the understanding that s/he will do the same simply to swell an individual’s publication list.... Another form, guest authorship, may be used for multiple purposes, including the belief that by adding a well-known name the guest will increase the likelihood of publication, credibility, or status of the work, or to conceal a paper’s industry ties by including an academic author....Interestingly, research conducted by Eastwood, Derish, Leash, and Ordway (1996) found one-third of respondents would credit an author who had not contributed to the publication. Typically, this is done in order to increase the likelihood of the research being accepted for publication or in other cases, as a means to promote their career."

Another scientific paper gives us some idea about how common misleading "guest authorship" is:

"Guest authorship has been defined as 'the designation of an individual who does not meet authorship criteria as an author.'  Guest authorship includes the practice of naming as authors individuals in senior positions (e.g., the director of a laboratory) in recognition of their perceived 'support' of the project, even if they did not contribute to conducting the study or writing the paper (sometimes referred to as 'honorary authorship'). Guest authorship has been found in 16% of research articles, 26% of review articles, 21% of editorials, and 41% of Cochrane reviews."

From the figures above we can make a plain deduction: gigantic numbers of scientists are claiming to have co-authored papers they did not actually co-author.  We should not assume that a "guest author" is not aware that he has been listed as a co-author of paper he did not co-write. We should assume that the "guest author" is complicit in the fraud. 

Method #2: Counting All Papers You've Authored or Co-Authored As Papers You've Written

The most outrageous type of misstatement involving the authorship of scientific papers occurs when scientists make patently misleading summaries of how many scientific papers they have written, something which happens very often.  There are two rules of honest communication that apply to summarizing your contribution to scientific papers:

(1) A scientist should claim to have "authored" or "written" a scientific paper if and only if he or she is the sole author of that paper.

(2) In all other cases (such as there being two or more authors) the scientist should only claim to have co-authored or co-written the paper. 

Any violation of these rules is dishonesty plain and simple.  For example, if a scientist has solely authored 50 papers and co-authored 100 papers, it is blatantly dishonest for the scientist to claim that he has "authored 150 scientific papers" or "written 150 scientific papers." Such a claim creates in the reader the idea that the scientist is the sole author of 150 papers, when he was the sole author of only 50 papers.  There is only one honest way for a scientist to describe such a situation: to make a statement such as "I have authored 50 scientific papers and co-authored 100 scientific papers."

 A check of the web page of a high-profile Harvard scientist finds the claim that the scientist has written "about 800 papers." Following the link that appears with this statement, we find that almost all of these papers were not solely written by the scientist, but were co-authored or merely partially authored by the scientist.  In most of these papers the scientist is not listed as the primary author.  Accordingly the claim that the scientist has written "about 800 papers" is extremely misleading.  Innumerable similar examples could be provided of scientists who misled us about the number of scientific papers they authored, by creating the idea that they were the main author of a certain number of papers, when they were only the main author of a small fraction of that number of papers. 

It is easy to find very many similar examples of scientists lying to us about how many scientific papers they have authored, by just doing a Google search for phrases such as these:

"author of more than 300 scientific papers" 

"author of more than 400 scientific papers"

"author of more than 500 scientific papers"

"author of more than 600 scientific papers"

"author of more than 700 scientific papers"

"author of more than 800 scientific papers"

It will generally be found that the scientist referred to did not individually author even half of the number of papers cited, and it will be very often found that the scientist was not even the primary author of half of the number of papers cited.  

Some of the leading web sites for tracking scientist publications help contribute to these deceptions. For example, if you go to the Microsoft Academic web site, and search for a particular scientist, you will see a graph showing a number of publications. The graph will give you the impression that the scientist wrote some particular number of scientific papers. But in almost all cases the scientist has merely co-written the number of papers listed. And very often he may have made no contribution at all to the paper, and merely appeared as a "guest author" when someone else incorrectly listed him on the list of authors. 

Let us look at a very typical example of such misrepresentations. Here is a graph I got at the Microsoft Academic web site when looking up a particular scientist:

The graph gives the very misleading idea that the scientist wrote nearly 80 papers in 2020. But the scientist in question was merely a  co-author of all these papers (most of which had more than 4 listed authors), and was neither the exclusive author nor the primary author of any of them. 

Such deceptive impressions appear all over the place in academia and on the Internet, where we are countless times given false impressions (visual or verbal) that particular scientists have done vastly more work than they have done. 

Method #3: Schlock for Stats

We can use the term "schlock for stats" for the extremely common practice of producing worthless junk papers, mainly for the sake of increasing an author's paper count. "Schlock" is a word meaning "cheap or inferior goods or material; trash."  There are many types of schlock scientific papers being produced these days. Some examples:

• Cosmology papers which involve some excessively speculative, enormously improbable and impossible-to-verify scenario, which is described in incomprehensible mathematical formulas, without the writer even bothering to tell us what the obscure mathematical symbols mean. 
• Very many evolutionary biology papers involving only unverifiable and extremely far-fetched speculations about things that might have happened hundreds of millions of years ago, often postulating events astronomically improbable or impossible because of limitations of DNA.
• Speculative chemistry papers giving chemical reaction equations only worked out on a blackboard, with the possibility of such reactions never even physically tested. 
• Neuroscience papers describing poorly designed experiments that used Questionable Research Practices, meaning the papers fail to provide robust evidence for anything.  
• Innumerable papers on topics of no importance.
• Innumerable papers so filled with jargon or obscure mathematics that they cannot be comprehended by anyone outside of some very tiny group of professors.

Under the assumption that schlock scientific papers will often get very little or no readership, we can get some ideas about the amount of schlock scientific papers by looking at statistics about readership and citation. We read here, "We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely by no more than 10 people." The same source estimates that 27 percent of the papers in the natural sciences are never cited.  At the source here we read this:  "According to one 2007 study...half of academic papers are read only by their authors and journal editors, the study's authors write." 

Ironically, at sites such as Microsoft Academic there will be no coverage of blogs, even though a blog (such as this one) covering academic topics may get very many times more readership than the entire science paper readership of the average scientist.    

Method #4: Inaccurate Titles and Inaccurate Abstract Statements Chosen to Increase Citation Counts

An extremely common practice nowadays is for scientific papers to make inaccurate claims in their titles and abstracts, claims not actually matching anything in the paper below such titles and abstracts. Scientists sometimes confess to doing this. At a blog entitled "Survival Blog for Scientists" and subtitled "How to Become a Leading Scientist," a blog that tells us  "contributors are scientists in various stages of their career," we have an explanation of why so many science papers have inaccurate titles:

"Scientists need citations for their papers....If the content of your paper is a dull, solid investigation and your title announces this heavy reading, it is clear you will not reach your citation target, as your department head will tell you in your evaluation interview. So to survive – and to impress editors and reviewers of high-impact journals,  you will have to hype up your title. And embellish your abstract. And perhaps deliberately confuse the reader about the content."

A study of inaccuracy in the titles of scientific papers states, "23.4 % of the titles contain inaccuracies of some kind."

Method #5: Self-Citation and Inappropriate Citation

Self-citation is what happens when some author cites scientific papers that he authored or co-authored, probably to increase his paper citation count. Self-citation is frowned upon, but extremely common. 

Inappropriate citation is when some scientific paper cites some other paper as support for some claim, when the paper does not actually support such a claim. A recent scientific paper entitled "Quotation errors in general science journals" tried to figure out how common such misleading citations are in science papers.  It found that such erroneous citations are not at all rare. Examining 250 randomly selected citations, the paper found an error rate of 25%.

We can reasonably suspect a sleazy "old boy network" at work here, in which Professor X has lots of professors he has encouraged to cite his papers (regardless of whether the citation is appropriate), with the understanding that such a favor will be reciprocated by that professor citing the papers of those professors (regardless of whether such citations are appropriate). 

We read here, "According to one estimate, only 20 per cent of papers cited have actually been read." Clearly there is a gigantic amount of sleazy citation going on the sake of artificially ballooning citation counts. 

It Seems That for Poltergeists the Bark Is Worse Than the Bite

 Of people who experience spooky disturbances, some of the most widely discussed are those who seem to experience poltergeist activity. The average person associates "poltergeist" with the idea of some unseen, uncommunicative and mischievous spooky presence. one that makes itself known by making rapping sounds, tossing around or shaking objects, or opening and closing doors (either full-sized doors or cabinet doors). But in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume 25, page 377), Professor William Barrett FRS states the following:

"They appear to have some intelligence behind them, for they frequently respond to requests made for a given number of raps ; the intelligence is therefore in some way related to our intelligence, and moreover is occasionally in telepathic rapport with our minds. For in one case, which I submitted to a long and searching enquiry, I found that when I mentally asked for a given number of raps, no word being spoken, the response was given promptly and correctly, and this four times in succession, a different number being silently asked for in each case."

In a similar vein, in Herbert Thurston's book entitled "Ghosts and Poltergeists" (pages 175-177) we read a first-hand account of an apparently communicative poltergeist:

"One morning I was told that strange things were happening in the house of an old woman who lived not five minutes off. She dwelt alone with her grandson, a boy of about fourteen years, who was rather feeble-minded and who complained that someone upset his bed every night so that he fell out on the floor. So the grandmother took him into her bed, and then her bed began to rock, too, so that they both nearly fell out together. She told some neighbours of mine and invited them to come round in the evening and see for themselves. So they asked me if I would like to accompany them....The next night we went again, and more happened. I distinctly saw the bed rise up on the side so that the leg of the bed was nearly a foot off the floor....Then the neighbours began to hear of it, and more people came; there would be five or six people in the room and as many as thirty in the little court outside looking through the window. Further, the more people came, the more the knockings, etc., increased in violence....He and the butcher placed themselves by the bed and tried with all their strength to keep it from rocking, but it rocked in spite of all their efforts, the legs rising about a foot off the floor. Then Armantine had an idea and said: 'Let us try if we can get it to answer us.'.... So Armantine stood forth in the middle ... and told it to knock once for 'no' and twice for ' yes,' and then started her questions with: ' Es-tu le bon Dieu? ' ['Are you the good God?'] 

Answer a very decided no. 

' Es-tu le diable ? '  ['Are you the devil?']

A hesitating no. 

' Es-tu de sa famille ?'  ['Are you from his family?']

A very decided yes. 

Then they thought they would like to know who sent it to bother the old woman, so they asked it: ' Was it a man who sent you ? ' ' No.' 'A woman ? ' ' Yes.' ' How old is she ? ' Thirty-four knocks. ' How many children has she ? ' Five knocks, etc., etc. 

Now I found out afterwards that nearly everyone there but myself had made up their minds that a certain woman had sent it, and the answers were all correct as regarded that woman and were what everyone but myself was expecting. They asked it a great many questions such as the time by the church clock, which it gave to the minute, though as it was pitch dark and the church clock is very erratic, we had to wait till next day to find out just how much difference there was between it and our watches. 

They told it to imitate various noises, such as sawing wood (you heard the saw and then the two bits drop), beating a drum, whetting a scythe, crowing like a cock. Each time it responded perfectly, also if they told it to tap on the ceiling, on the floor, or in the armoire, it did it almost before the words were out of their mouths. Then I had a try in English, and it did everything I told it to do. I was the only person in the room who understood English. Then Rene spoke to it in ' Flamand,' and he told us it did everything he said. 

This sort of thing went on every night for a fortnight [two weeks], and the village got more and more excited; reporters came from Beauvais— even from Paris...Unfortunately, I was obliged to leave and go to England, so I do not know exactly how it came to an end."

Although the story above defies typical notions of a poltergeist as mysterious noises and inexplicable movements not accompanied by communication, the account above is similar to some other accounts, including the famous "Rochester rappings" series of events in Hydesville, New York involving the Fox sisters and very many witnesses. 

Such accounts of poltergeist activity have occurred not just long ago, but in more recent times. One prominent example is the 1977 Enfield poltergeist case discussed here.  We read this:

"The occurrences were similar to those reported in other cases of the ‘poltergeist’ type: knockings and other noises with no apparent cause; doors opening and closing by themselves; furniture overturned; small objects hurled across rooms; picture frames ripped from walls; small fires that started and went out by themselves, and suchlike. The events continued for just over a year and in many cases were witnessed by neighbours, investigators, technicians, press reporters and broadcasters, police officers and others."

Below is an astonishing account on page 7 of the March 2019 edition of Edge Science magazine published by the Society for Scientific Exploration:

"In press reports from 2010, Lalm kindergarten in Gudbrandsdalen (meaning Gudbrand’s Valley), Norway, appeared to be a veritable haunted house. Between April 26 and June 15, all 15 employees witnessed diverse objects— cups, mugs, stones, jars, etc.—flying through the rooms! Sometimes these items seemed to appear out of thin air. In addition, doors opened and closed by themselves, figures were drawn with crayons moved by no one’s hand (no human’s hand that is...), feathers used for decoration organized themselves into specific patterns, and so on. More than 90 seemingly inexplicable episodes occurred. And, interestingly enough, many of these events were observed by two or three adults simultaneously. In some cases, there were even as many as 20 witnesses."

Hollywood sometimes tries to depict poltergeist activity as something causing severe terror. But the Thurston book entitled "Ghosts and Poltergeists" suggests that the bark of poltergeists may be worse than their bite. In the book we read the following:

"The same peculiarity, viz., that though mischief is done it is not of a character dangerous to life or limb, recurs over and over again in poltergeist phenomena. Several examples have been cited here in previous chapters both of objects flung with violence which missed the human target by a hair’s breadth, and of others which were strangely arrested in full career and fell harmless like spent bullets after inflicting a mere tap. With regard to the fires spontaneously breaking out, the case of the Indian poltergeist, referred to above (page 62), is particularly impressive. Mr. Thangapragasam Pillay was terrified out of his wits at these recurrent excitements, but no damage was done to the fabric of his house. There was always someone at hand to notice and extinguish the fires. Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, speaking of a Welsh poltergeist, declared that in pelting people with all sorts of unpleasant missiles it only meant to tease them without really doing any hurt.  Fifty years later William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, speaks as if such cases were not infrequent and makes a similar comment.” 

Later the author states this, again suggesting the phrase "his bark is worse than his bite" may apply to poltergeists: 

"Objects are projected with alarming velocity, and often seem directly aimed at some human target, but for all that there is hardly a single well-attested instance of injury resulting to life or limb. Mockery and mere annoyance seem to be the main purpose of these assaults. Consequently the missiles which often fly so swiftly and so menacingly either do no more than graze the victim against whom they are directed, or are mysteriously arrested in the moment of impact and do little or no damage."

Writing long before the invention of the internet, the author makes this very interesting summary of the consistency of testimony regarding poltergeist activity:

""It is often hard to see how simple people, who plainly know nothing of the existence of other similar phenomena, should describe over and over again just the same peculiar happenings which are attested elsewhere by eye-witnesses of the highest credit. The pulling off of the bedclothes from people asleep at night, the dragging across the floor of heavy bedsteads or articles of furniture—feats beyond the physical strength of the children suspected of playing pranks—the curved path taken by missiles which sweep around corners or twist in and out as a living bird might do, the gentle descent to the floor in some cases of large pictures or mirrors whose cords and supporting hooks remain intact, the flight of showers of stones which seem to come from space and are only perceptible when quite near, the sudden and harmless arrest of swiftly moving objects which threaten destruction to anything that impedes their progress, the spontaneous bursting open of securely fastened doors in full view of watchful observers, the escape from closed receptacles of articles stored therein without any discernible means of exit, the constant disappearance and hiding of domestic odds and ends specially needed which are often afterwards restored in ways equally mysterious, the sudden outbreak of a conflagration in places where no spark or source of fire existed— these features recur all over the world in countries as far remote from each other as Canada and the Dutch East Indies. Moreover, not to speak of several medieval examples,  we find highly respected divines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholics as well as Protestants, suffering from similar visitations and giving identically the same descriptions of the phenomena as those we read today."

Writing in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume 25, page 378), Professor William Barrett also suggests that the bark of poltergeists is worse than their bite:

"The movement of objects is usually quite unlike that due to gravitational or other attraction. They slide about, rise in the air, move in eccentric paths, sometimes in a leisurely manner, often turn round in their career, and usually descend quietly without hurting the observers. At other times an immense weight is lifted, often in daylight, no one being near, crockery is thrown about and broken, bedclothes are dragged off, the occupants sometimes lifted gently to the ground, and the bedstead tilted up or dragged about the room. The phenomena occur both in broad daylight and at night. Sometimes bells are continuously rung, even if all the bell wires are removed. Stones are frequently thrown, but no one is hurt ; I myself have seen a large pebble drop apparently from space in a room where the only culprit could have been myself, and certainly I did not throw it." 

At the link here we can read the August 1868 edition (Volume XXII No. CXXX) of the Atlantic Monthly, one of America's oldest magazines (now publishing as The Atlantic).  The first seven pages have an article entitled "A Remarkable Case of 'Physical Phenomena.' "  We read an extremely well-documented case of poltergeist activity that dramatically dragged on for two months, with very many astonishing phenomena reported occurring during the months of July and August 1867. The writer (an H. A. Willis) quotes from a journal logging a great variety of inexplicable movements of objects.  Although the writer describes himself as very skeptical about deceased spirits producing effects in earthly homes, he seems to have believed in the physical reality of the inexplicable phenomena he described. One of the most dramatic events reported was the repeated ringing of bells suspended eleven feet high from the ceiling, which occurred only when young Mary Carrick was in the room. This occurred even after the bell wires had been removed, and often occurred with "violent agitation."  

I published within 24 hours after their occurrences descriptions of two events very much like some of the events described above: (1) the mysterious inexplicable opening of a locked door (described here), and (2) the mysterious removal of a pillow from under my head, with it being deposited on the floor (described here).  

In the Thurston book on poltergeists, we read the following interesting statement:

"In the case of flying stones many observers speak as if these missiles could never be perceived until they were less than a yard off. It would almost seem as if the agency at work, whatever its nature may be, possessed the power of rendering them invisible, just as there is much evidence which suggests that the same agency is able to introduce material objects into a room through closed doors."

My own experience contains a case along these lines, discussed here. I sat at the top of my apartment building inner stairway, and was tying my shoes.  Suddenly I heard some set of keys fall down the stairs, just as if they had fallen from my body. I assumed the keys had fallen from my own shirt pocket, until I went to the bottom of the stairs and found a set of keys I had never seen before.  The inexplicable appearance occurred the day after an equally baffling appearance suggesting that some "agency is able to introduce material objects into a room through closed doors." The same idea was suggested by observations of mine I describe in the posts here and here and here.  People have the idea of poltergeist activity as some mysterious movement of objects already in the room, but it seems that in cases of poltergeist activity there quite often reportedly occurs an inexplicable appearance of some object, the arrival of which cannot be accounted for.  The word "apports" is used for such appearances. 

I have no photographic evidence of such occurrences, but I did photograph and publish an extremely clear video showing my camera taking about 300 photos by itself, in 13 separate bursts, just as if some invisible force was pressing its shutter button in an on and off fashion.   There was nothing wrong with the shutter button or anything else on the camera in question, which worked without any problem during hour-long photography sessions on more than fifty different days between the date of this video (October 18, 2019) and December 31, 2019.

Postscript: In the interesting book The Problems of Psychical Research by Hereward Carrington, we have an account of a poltergeist by a woman who Carrington vouches for, calling her "an exceptionally sane, balanced, and more than ordinarily sceptical observer."  Her account below is consistent with the "bark worse than the byte" comments I make above. We read this:

"One of the most frequent phenomena, and one which occurred when three or four, and sometimes six, persons have been present, was the persistent throwing about of pins, needles, hairpins, &c. — no person in the room ever being struck by the point of a pin, although they passed through our clothing, pinning it together ; and pins were found stuck firm and fast in the picture mouldings, in the door panels, and between the frames and glass of pictures and mirrors. All sorts of small, light articles such as the above-mentioned would be dropped in our laps if sitting or at our feet if standing, apparently from nowhere, as there was never any sound and no one saw them until they felt them....These phenomena occurred with great regularity nearly every day (not necessarily at the same hour or in the same place) ; but something took place almost daily from December 1909 until August 1910, and occasionally since."

They Concluded (Very "Scientifically") That the Sky Was Full of Gods

When it started out, Darwinism was something pretty simple: it was basically an analgesic.  Various people (mainly those with atheistic tendencies) were very irritated by the idea that the biological world seemed to be filled with objects resembling the product of design rather than chance.  Darwinism was like an aspirin that soothed such irritation, by assuring such people that all in biology was merely the result of chance.  There were some very questionable ingredients in that analgesic, such as a not-actually-truthful slogan of "natural selection" which involved a survival-of-the-fittest effect that did involve any real choice or selection, and an excess of far-fetched speculation, unrealistic generalization, and tall-tale talk. But when someone has irritation that needs to be soothed, he often doesn't care too much about what is in the pain reliever he is taking. 

As it slowly took root in the conformist social structure of the universities,  Darwinism started to grow into something much more than just an analgesic.  Within academia Darwinism started to grow into a kind of religion-in-all-but-name, something offering a new creation myth.  

Universities are the perfect soil for the growth of stealth religions.  Universities have impressive old stone buildings just like the impressive old stone buildings of the Catholic Church. And the hierarchical authority structure of universities resembles the hierarchical authority structure of the Catholic Church, with assistant professors and adjunct professors acting like nuns and deacons, full professors being like priests, assistant deans being like bishops and deans being like cardinals.  Best of all, each university has its own flock of docile listeners (its student body) that resembles the attending members of a church. And while churches ususally don't command their membership to attend church every week, universities do actually command their students to spend a certain number of hours per month listening to the lessons of professors. Darwinism did qualify as a religion under the definition of religion given by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who defined a religion as "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." Darwinism lacked any deity, but some other religions such as Daoism, Confucianism, the original form of Buddhism and Scientology also had no deity. 

By about 1930 Darwinism had become an impressive stealth religion that had infiltrated academia, but it was not a very exciting creed.  Its gospel was basically this: "Mankind and all are other species are just accidents of blind natural forces, and let us note how wonderfully clever scientists were to have figured this out."  There was nothing very exciting about such a message. Darwinism in universities was very closely entangled for decades with an interesting program of eugenics that claimed to offer a "how to make the world better" agenda. However, such an agenda became rather radioactive once it was discovered how horribly the Nazis had used similar ideas. 

But things started to get more interesting when people started to ramp Darwinian ideas up to a galactic level.  The basic idea was: let's imagine blind Darwinian evolution occurring not just on Earth, but on planets all over the galaxy.  The real leader in such a leap of imagination was Hollywood.  There were three great leaps propelling us into a world of fantasy. 

• First there was the seminal 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. It told a fascinating story of interstellar astronauts in the 23rd century who used a faster-than-light starship to reach the distant planet Altair IV, a life-bearing revolving around another star.  The story involved a scientist (Dr. Mobius) who was studying a race that used to inhabit Altair IV, and reached god-like powers before mysteriously becoming extinct.  
• Then there was the 1965-1968 TV series Star Trek, which involved space travelers such as Kirk, McCoy and Spock very conveniently traveling around the galaxy in a starship that could travel at "warp speeds" much faster than the speed of light.  The galaxy depicted was incredibly convenient, for it seemed that almost always when visting a new planet,  Kirk, McCoy and Spock found the planet well-inhabited by life, with conditions so hospitable that these astronauts almost never even needed to wear a spacesuit or even put on a light jacket.  The Star Trek series spawned innumerable movie and TV spin-offs in the decades that followed. Another TV series running in the 1960's  (Lost in Space) depicted astronauts shuttling around from inhabited planet to inhabited planet with similar convenience. 
• Then there was the wildly popular 1977 movie Star Wars, the first in an almost endless series of sequels and prequels. Although set in another galaxy, the movie carried the "convenient interstellar travel" theme to a rather ridiculous extreme, by imagining instantaneous interstellar travel by means of wormhole travel involving "jumping through hyperspace." 

There was thus planted in the public mind an exciting vision rooted much more in fantasy than in fact: a vision of a galaxy conveniently filled with planets inhabited by intelligent beings,  with the laws of nature conveniently favoring very rapid travel between such planets, by means of "space warps" or "space-time wormholes." Very much of this vision was contrary to what scientists had actually learned. 

Artist's depiction of a space-time wormhole

For one thing, scientists had made no discoveries justifying any optimism that life would tend to naturally arise on other planets, and had made no discoveries justifying any optimism that intelligent life would tend to naturally arise on other planets. To the contrary, no experiments realistically simulating early earth conditions had produced life, and no such experiments had produced any of the building blocks of life (functional proteins).  In fact, no  experiments realistically simulating early earth conditions had produced any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids, nucleotides and ribose sugars).  Also, nothing had been discovered that would justify optimism that microscopic life would naturally make some leap to become multicellular life, or that multicellular life would become intelligent life. 

As for interstellar travel, the facts told a story totally different from what was depicted in the movies.  Physicists had discovered in the first half of the twentieth century that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit. Since stars are separated by distances such as five light years, this means it should be physically impossible for anyone to ever travel from one solar system to another solar system in less than about five years. 

During the 1960's and 1970's Darwinist scientists offered a rather different version of galactic Darwinism.  This far-less cinematic-friendly version was often realistic about the apparent impossibility of rapid interstellar travel. But it had the same ideas of a galaxy packed with intelligent life. Yes, such scientists told us, the extraterrestrials are out there, in droves, but practically the one way to communicate with them is not by sending spaceships but by using big radio telescope dishes to communicate by radio messages. 

One of the principal spokesmen for this less cinematic-friendly version of galactic Darwinism was the astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan preached that the galaxy was full of extraterrestrial civilizations. He would confidently cite estimates of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy that varied between 1 million and 100 million, assuring us that that such numbers were the "best estimates" of experts such as himself.  The idea that such numbers were based on anything other than wild guesses all over the place was pure fiction, and throughout Sagan's career there was always the strongest scientific basis for suspecting that the number of other civilizations in the galaxy was zero, particularly if only natural factors were at play on other planets.  

Sagan assured us that the galaxy was teeming with super-advanced civilizations, all of which were far more advanced than humans. At about the 1:09 minute mark in the interview here,  Sagan claimed to understand the nature of humanity's status in the galaxy. He stated, “If you look at time scales, you realize that our civilization is the most backward civilization in the galaxy that can communicate.” Sagan's rationale for such a claim was that since some extraterrestrial civilization could have arisen at any time in the past billion years, it would almost certainly have arisen millions of years ago rather than just thousands of years ago.  So, he thought, the extraterrestrials must be far, far more advanced than us.  

Of course, any civilization millions of years more advanced than ours would presumably have technological powers that would make them god-like. So this notion of a galaxy filled with god-like races was an enthralling one. A believer in such a notion could look up at the night sky and say to himself, "The sky is full of gods."

Such an ideology was articulated by Stanley Kubrick, the director of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (about god-like extraterrestrials interacting mysteriously with humans). In a 1968 interview Kubrick said this: 

"When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans....these beings would be gods to the billions of less advanced races in the universe, just as man would appear a god to an ant that somehow comprehended man’s existence. They would possess the twin attributes of all deities—omniscience and omnipotence. These entities might be in telepathic communication throughout the cosmos and thus be aware of everything that occurs, tapping every intelligent mind as effortlessly as we switch on the radio; they might not be limited by the speed of light and their presence could penetrate to the farthest corners of the universe; they might possess complete mastery over matter and energy; and in their final evolutionary stage, they might develop into an integrated collective immortal consciousness. They would be incomprehensible to us except as gods; and if the tendrils of their consciousness ever brushed men’s minds, it is only the hand of God we could grasp as an explanation."

With the addition of such grandiose ideas, it became ever-more-apparent that Darwinism had evolved into a kind of stealth religion. Now this religion had its own powerful gods (the imagined super-advanced extraterrestrials), and various tales could be told of how the world might be transformed when humans interact with such super-powerful beings, tales rather like ancient tales of the Last Days or the millennium or the apocalypse. Also, tales could be told of how humans had interacted with such god-like beings in ancient times, a branch of storytelling that became the specialty of people like Erich von Daniken and the Ancient Aliens TV show. The latter type of tales often resembled the stories of ancient miracles told in churches. 

It's not much fun being lowly inferior Earthlings when the sky is all filled with god-like extraterrestrials, but astronomers such as Carl Sagan tried to make people think that we might soon be able to climb our way up to our own godhood.  He kept suggesting that extraterrestrial civilizations may have prepared what he called an "Encyclopedia Galactica" containing all of their knowledge, and they might send us this treasure trove of knowledge by radio transmission.  It was a new version of "pie in the sky." Many of his readers must have thought that mankind would soon climb its way up to godhood, once our radio transmitters picked up a copy of this "Encyclopedia Galactica."

Very strangely, Sagan mocked observations of UFOs, and did everything he could to discourage claims that Earth is being visited from other planets. This made no sense given his other claims. If it were true that the galaxy is filled with a million or more super-advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, then we should see signs of such civilizations all over the place, including periodic visits from spaceships to Earth.  A single extraterrestrial civilization would need no more than 10 million years to spread itself throughout the galaxy (which has a diameter of only about 100,000 light-years), particularly since colonized planets would eventually be able to  colonize other planets revolving around other stars, and given a million years we would expect colonies of colonies of colonies of colonies. 

So if there were really a million extraterrestrial civilizations that were typically many millions of years old,  by now the galaxy should be teeming with signs of their activity; and their spaceships should be all over the place. It made no sense to maintain the existence of a vast horde of very old extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, and also to mock the idea that spaceships from such civilizations have recently visited Earth.  Doing such a thing was as silly as maintaining that there will be a thousand nuclear bomb explosions in the cities of the United States, but mocking the idea that anyone will be hurt from such explosions. The same inconsistency was repeated by countless other astrobiologists between 1950 and 2020, who most inconsistently claimed that the galaxy was packed with very old civilizations but that none of them had visited Earth.  

How to explain such an inconsistency, which no independent reasoner ever be expected to reach? We can only explain it by remembering that today's professors are herd-following conformist creatures who are men of a hundred taboos.  An astrobiologist will senselessly believe that organisms more organized than anything humans have ever made can arise by blind accidental processes, because this silly belief has become a required dogma for today's scientists, an obligatory doctrine of faith that each professor must kneel to or risk condemnation for heresy.  But the same astrobiologist will assure us vigorously that he does not at all believe that any of the vast number of very old extraterrestrial civilizations he believes in is visiting our planet, because a belief in UFOs is one of the very many senseless belief taboos in academia, many of which are taboos against believing in the existence of things that have been very well-observed for centuries (such as clairvoyance and apparitions).  

The grandiose ideas of galactic Darwinism described above were never well-supported by observations, and were in very important ways incompatible with observations. The table below summarizes the differences between reality and the fanciful notions of galactic Darwinism.

Claims of galactic Darwinists	Reality
“The stuff of life is all over the place in outer space. The galaxy is teeming with the building blocks of life.”	The building blocks of macroscopic life are cells, and the building blocks of microscopic life are functional proteins. Neither cells nor functional proteins have ever been detected in space.  The building blocks of the building blocks of life are the 20 amino acids used by living things, and the four nucleotides used by living things. None of those 24 things has  ever been found in outer space, with the exception of one or two of them (glycine and alanine), which have merely been detected in no more than the tiniest microscopic trace amounts.
“Experiments show that the building blocks of life would naturally arise.”	No experiment realistically simulating the early Earth has ever produced either the building blocks of microscopic life (protein molecules) nor any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids or nucleotides). The Miller-Urey experiment failed in multiple ways to realistically simulate early Earth conditions.
“The galaxy is filled with planets.”	Correct, and the number of planets may be a few times greater than the number of stars in the galaxy (about 200 billion).
“Scientists have already discovered Earth-like planets revolving around other stars.”	No claim should ever be made that scientists have discovered an Earth-like planet until life has been found on another planet, which has not occurred.
“Many of the planets already discovered could support life as well as Earth does.”	In a recent news article we read, “None of the potentially habitable Earth-like exoplanets known to astronomers today have the right conditions to sustain life as we know it on Earth, with a rich biosphere of plants, microbes and animals, a new study has found.”
“Life will arise whenever conditions are right on a planet.”	To the contrary, everything we have learned about the very great organization and complexity of even the simplest living things suggests that the natural origin of life should be impossible, and should be as unlikely as a thrown deck of cards accidentally forming into a house of cards consisting of 52 cards. The concept of abiogenesis (that life can naturally arise from non-life) is a concept with zero observational and experimental support.
“Once life gets started, it will evolve into large complex organisms such as mammals.”	There is no credible theory explaining how microscopic life could evolve into incredibly organized large organisms such as mammals. Darwinism fails to explain a jump from prokaryotic cells to vastly more organized eukaryotic cells. Darwinism fails to credibly explain the origin of the many millions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom (each its own very complex invention too unlikely to appear by any natural process), and also fails to credibly explain the origin of anatomical innovations (which cannot be explained by changes in DNA, since DNA does not specify anatomy).
“We should expect that on a large fraction of the planets with life, intelligent life has arisen."	Humans are completely lacking in any credible natural explanation for the arising of intelligence on our planet. Claims that the appearance of intelligent conscious beings can be explained by an increase in brain size are untenable.  None of the main characteristics of human minds can be credibly explained as being caused by brain activity.  Scientists have no understanding of how neurons could produce thought, understanding, consciousness or self-hood. Scientists have no credible explanation for such basic human mental phenomena as the instant formation of memories, the 50-year preservation of memories, and the instant recall of rarely remembered things learned long ago.  The low-level facts scientists have learned about the brain and synapses reveal them as things with very high instability, very rapid molecular turnover, very high levels of noise, very high signal slowing factors and signal transmission unreliability, factors which make the brain untenable as a source of human mentality.  Therefore we lack any sound basis for predicting how often intelligent life would appear on some planet on which life existed.
“Astrobiologists agree that the galaxy is filled with intelligent beings.”	Appeals to a majority of opinion in some small group of specialists are unpersuasive, because such groups are very prone to groupthink, and some unwarranted belief dogma may become an expected norm in some research community, an orthodoxy which it is heresy to defy.  If 100% of astrobiologists believed that life in the galaxy is common, this would no more prove such a thing than papal infallibility is proven by 100% of Catholic bishops believing in such a doctrine.  Moreover, the only way to reliably measure the opinions of some group is to do secret ballots, and people don't do secret ballots of scientists asking them about their beliefs on scientific topics.  So we don't actually know whether most astrobiologists believe extraterrestrial life is common.
“Humans must be one of the most primitive of the intelligent species in the galaxy. Extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy are mostly vastly older than mankind.”	Civilizations vastly older than humanity would presumably have god-like technological powers. But we see no sign of such god-like powers at work in our galaxy. The galaxy looks as it would look if Earth was the only planet with a civilization. The predicted Dyson Spheres have not been found.
“It is the height of arrogance for us to believe that we are the the most advanced race in the galaxy when there are so many other planets.”	Many chances does not mean many successes, and if something is sufficiently improbable, it won't happen even if there are trillions or quadrillions of chances for it to happen. If the chance of intelligent life naturally arising on a planet is much less than 1 in a trillion (and there are many reasons for thinking that it is), then it is reasonable to conclude that there are probably no other intelligent races in our galaxy, unless some intelligent agency is acting to produce such races.  Such a conclusion is straightforward mathematical reasoning involving no arrogance at all.
“We will find proof of extraterrestrial civilizations once we start seriously looking for radio signals from them.”	Well-funded efforts to detect radio signals and optical signals from other planets have been going on for decades, and have not produced any evidence for extraterrestrials.
“Fast travel around the galaxy should be possible by craft using warp drives or space-time- wormholes.”	Warp drives and space-time wormholes are fantasy. It is a law of nature that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So traveling from one star to the nearest star should always take about five years or more, probably very much longer because of the difficulty of building any spaceship capable of reaching even half of the speed of light.
“We are the most primitive intelligent species in the galaxy.”	While it is possible that there are many other intelligent species in our galaxy (particularly if some intelligent causal agency is working to produce such species), as far as we know we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy.
“UFOs show that there are other extraterrestrials in our galaxy.”	We have no evidence that UFOs are from other planets in our galaxy, and there are various alternate possible explanations (some paranormal) for UFOs. If any UFO is from another planet, that does not prove that life can arise  on such a planet by Darwinian processes.

Researcher Survey Reveals the Sick State of Animal Cognition Research

Claims that neuroscientists make about brains, minds and memory are mainly based on experiments with animals. This is largely because of the moral restrictions against doing brain experiments on human subjects.  With a rat you can do something like open up its brain and scan some of its cells to look for signs of brain changes caused by learning, or you can do something like remove part of the rat's brain to see whether that affects learning. But you can't do those kind of experiments with a human without engaging in behavior that would be widely condemned. 

You do not need any survey of animal cognition researchers to know that the field of animal cognition research is in a sick state.  You can do that by making a critical analysis of the papers published by such researchers. You will find a very large prevalance of Questionable Research Practices and other serious problems.  Among the problems are these:

(1) Researchers routinely do experiments with insufficient sample sizes, very often using study group sizes smaller than 15 subjects.  !5 subjects per study group is the minimum needed for a moderately reliable result, and any study using fewer than 15 subjects in any of its study groups will have a very high chance of producing a false alarm. 

(2) Researchers routinely fail to show evidence that their experiments followed a blinding protocol designed to reduce experimenter bias under which a researcher will "see whatever he wants to see." Usually no mention will be made of of any blinding procedure, and the word "blind" or "blinding" will not even appear in the paper describing the research.  In the minority of cases in which some mention is made of blinding, the mention will be some half-hearted mention of some fragmentary effort at a blinding protocol. Almost never will we read a discussion of how a detailed plan was made to implement a thorough blinding protocol, and a discussion of how such a plan was followed. 

(3) The overwhelming majority of animal cognition research papers will fail to show any evidence that a detailed hypothesis was chosen before an experiment began, and that the scientific paper reported on whether the pre-selected hypothesis succeeded or failed. The overwhelming majority of such papers will not be pre-registered papers in which the authors chose (before gather data) a hypothesis to be tested, how data would be gathered, and how data would be analyzed. Instead the great majority of papers will give the impression of using "fishing expedition" techniques in which data is gathered, and then the researchers were free to "slice and dice" the data in innumerable ways, trying different data analysis methods until there turned up what could be called some marginal evidence for any hypothesis that the researchers might have dreamed up after gathering data. 

(4) In some cases bad experimental methods have become a tradition. For example, the reigning tradition among animal cognition researchers is to try to measure fear in rodents by making estimates of "freezing behavior."  Such a subjective and unreliable method of judging fear is far less reliable than measuring heart rate, which reliably undergoes a very sharp spike when rodents are afraid. 

(5) Researchers very often make claims in the title or abstracts of their papers that are not justified by any research described in their papers.  They sometimes confess to doing this. At a blog entitled "Survival Blog for Scientists" and subtitled "How to Become a Leading Scientist," a blog that tells us  "contributors are scientists in various stages of their career," we have an explanation of why so many science papers have inaccurate titles:

"Scientists need citations for their papers....If the content of your paper is a dull, solid investigation and your title announces this heavy reading, it is clear you will not reach your citation target, as your department head will tell you in your evaluation interview. So to survive – and to impress editors and reviewers of high-impact journals,  you will have to hype up your title. And embellish your abstract. And perhaps deliberately confuse the reader about the content."

The European Journal of Neuroscience published an editorial entitled "Getting published: how to write a successful neuroscience paper." The editorial emphasized that the title and abstract of a neuroscientist paper need to be "enticing," and suggested the use of the active voice, using the example of saying that neurons signal something about memory. We can only guess at how many neuroscience papers have been given misleading and inaccurate titles because neuroscientists are being advised to use "enticing" titles for their papers, and urged to use the active voice in referring to mindless and passive chemicals and cells. 

Recently there was published a paper which gives us a different way of detecting the sick state of animal cognition research. Entitled "The hidden side of animal cognition research: Scientists’ attitudes toward bias, replicability and scientific practice," the paper was a survey of scientists doing animal cognition research. 210 researchers filled out the survey.  Collectively their answers are an indictment of the dysfunctional state of animal cognition research. 

When asked about bias in their experiments, nearly 80% of researchers confessed that they found themselves often or sometimes hoping for some particular result in their study.  When we have such a level of bias and a failure of most animal cognition research papers to follow a blinding protocol to reduce bias, we have basically a sure-fire recipe for unreliable results caused by unmitigated experimenter bias.  When asked whether the results and theories in their area of animal cognition research are strongly affected by the biases of researchers, more of the experimenters agreed than disagreed.  When asked whether the results and theories in other areas of animal cognition research are strongly affected by the biases of researchers, far more of the experimenters agreed than disagreed, with 46% agreeing, and only 15% disagreeing. 

When asked about overstating claims in papers (making claims in a paper that are not justified by the research), 7.7% of researchers confessed to making stronger claims than warranted.  Remembering the fact that only a tiny fraction of people confess to wrongdoing they have done, we should assume that the actual number of animal cognition researchers making stronger claims than warranted is many times higher than this 7.7%.  Indeed, when asked about the practices of other researchers in animal cognition,  56% of the respondents said that other researchers in animal cognition made stronger claims than warranted.   

When asked about what percent of their experimental studies have been published or will be published, the average response was 80%. This suggests there is a very large problem that studies producing null results will tend not to be published.  So, for example, if a researcher produces a result that does not support prevailing neuroscientist dogmas about brains storing memories, such a study will simply end up in a file drawer without being published. 

Researchers in animal cognition confessed to a rather low confidence in the statistical analysis in their papers.  When asked whether they "somewhat agree" or "strongly agree" that the statistical analysis in their own papers is valid, 42.9% said that they merely "somewhat agree" rather than "strongly agree."  Since this is a self-confession question and since we would expect that only a small fraction of the researchers who doubt their own statistical analysis would confess to having doubt, we may assume that it is actually the great majority of animal cognition researchers who lack strong confidence in their statistical analysis.  There are strong reasons for suspecting that extremely dubious statistical analysis is more the rule rather than the exception in animal cognition research. One respondent stated, "The majority of animal cognition researchers have a very sparse statistical education," and that this can be "a huge potential for errors."

Why is there so much arcane statistical analysis in neuroscience papers? It's because typically experimenters get results providing no good evidence for the incorrect dogmas they are trying to support. Then our researchers very often decide to keep playing around with statistical analysis until the data seems to provide some faint whisper sounding a bit like the desired effect.  There's an old expression: if you torture the data sufficiently, it will confess to anything. 

When asked how often Questionable Research Practices occur in their own research,  27% of animal cognition researchers confessed that such QRP practices occur "sometimes," "often" or "always."  Since this is a self-confession question in which we would expect that only a small fraction of the researchers engaging in Questionable Research Practices would confess to doing so, we should assume that the actual percentage of such researchers engaging in Questionable Research Practices is far higher than 50% (an assumption very much warranted from reading the papers of such researchers).  When asked about how often Questionable Research Practices occur in the research of other animal cognition researchers, 52.7% of the respondents said that such practices occur "sometimes," and 28.9% of the respondents said that such practices occur "often" or "always." 

When asked about replication, 73% of the respondents agreed that some areas of animal cognition research would experience a replication crisis if attempts to replicate most of its studies were attempted.  This amounts to a confession of large-scale unreliability in animal cognition research. 

How would things work if experimental science was being done properly? For one thing, there would be some central repository in which scientists could (without any restriction) do things such as (1) publish a research protocol for an upcoming experiment, which would amount to a public promise to test one particular hypothesis, and to gather and analyze data in a particular way, and (2) concisely report the results (null or not) of particular experiments, regardless of whether any paper on such a result got published.  But the animal cognition survey research paper states that no such repository even exists. We read this:

"While there is currently no central repository or systematic method for study registration (c.f. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ for medical trials), research groups could seek to publicly archive all studies they conduct, which would allow other researchers to assess the strength of evidence not just from individual studies, but in relation to the entire research programme they have come from."

So our science community does not even have one of the most basic tools it should have to do research in a competent way. How lame is that? 

What the very illuminating "hidden side of animal cognition research" study reveals is that animal cognition research is in a sick and dysfunctional state.  We should remember this every single time a scientist claims that memories are stored in brains and that brains produce minds.  Such claims are mostly based on animal cognition research, which is a diseased and dysfunctional branch of research that is a not a reliable pillar for anything.  There is no robust evidence for any of the main claims of neuroscientists.  We have no good evidence from either animals or humans that brains store memories or that brains are the source of human mental effects such as self-awareness,  thinking, instantaneous memory recall, imagination, understanding and self-hood. To the contrary, low-level research on brains very frequently provides us with strong reasons for rejecting all such claims, revealing the brain and its synapses as too slow, unreliable, noisy and unstable to be the source of the human mind and its abilities. 

They Felt a Great Disturbance

 In the first Star Wars movie, there is a memorable scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi (played by Alec Guinness) suddenly states this:

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

In the movie Obi-Wan Kenobi is psychically sensing the destruction of the planet Alderaan by the Death Star.  Obi-Wan Kenobi was a Jedi master. But it seems that ordinary humans can sometimes sense in an anomalous way when a fellow human faces death or great injury or peril. Let us look at some interesting examples, all of which involve sudden feelings or physical or auditory manifestations rather  than sightings of an apparition or ghost. 

A Dr. Olivier states the following: 

"On October 10, 1881, I received a professional call into the country about seven miles from my home....All at once, the animal's forefeet slipped and he fell, his mouth striking the ground. Naturally, I was thrown far over his head. My shoulder struck the earth and I fractured my collar-bone.  At this very moment my wife, who was undressing at home and preparing to go to bed, had a strong inward feeling that an accident had happened to me; she was seized with a nervous trembling, began to cry, and called the maid : 'Come quickly, I am frightened, some misfortune has happened to my husband; he is dead or injured.' Until my arrival she kept the servant beside her and did not cease weeping. She wished to send a man to find me, but she did not know to what village I had gone. I returned home about one o'clock in the morning and called the servant to bring me a light and unsaddle my horse. 'I am hurt,' I said, 'I can't move my shoulder.' "

Louis Perier reported that in 1912 he was awoken by a nightmare of a friend: "I saw my comrade, his skull open, breathing his last, bidding me farewell and embracing me." Hours later he was told that this comrade had jumped out a window and fractured his skull fatally. 

As related here, a person who had not heard of his aunt in ten years was suddenly struck by the feeling that his aunt had died. He told another person of this feeling. The same day a telegram arrived, announcing that the aunt had died.  On another day the same person announced to his wife, "They have killed the king of Italy."  But looking out the window, he saw some flags flying normally, and reassured himself that this was proof no such death had happened.  An hour later he saw the flags flying at half-mast because the King of Italy (Umberto I) had been assassinated. 

As related here, a man named Thomas Garrison suddenly felt an intense desire to see his mother, a desire so intense that he left his baby with a stranger at a church where his wife was, ran to catch a train, and after missing the train ran seven miles to his mother's house, finding that she had unexpectedly died. Before checking her room, he cried out, "She is dead," to a sister who did not know the mother had died. 

The works of Camille Flammarion on paranormal phenomena are must-reads for any serious scholar of parapsychology.  Those works include the three volumes of his monumental trilogy Death and Its Mystery (which you can read here, here and here), his work Mysterious Psychic Forces (which you can read here), and his great work The Unknown (which you can read here).  On page 50 of the latter work, we read this account of a woman that "felt a great disturbance" at the time of the death of a governess who had looked after her:

"Suddenly Madame Parmentier was awakened by her bed being shaken from top to bottom. She was astonished and somewhat alarmed; she woke her husband, aud told him what had occurred. Suddenly a second shock took place, this time very violent. General Parmentier's father thought it was an earthquake, though earthquakes are very rare in Alsace. He got up, lit a candle, and seeing nothing unusual went to bed again. But, immediately after, the bed was again shaken violently; then came a great noise in the next room, as if the windows were shut violently and all their panes were broken. The earthquake seemed to continue worse than ever....When they found that there had been nothing to cause noise or confusion in the salon, that the windows were still open and the furniture unmoved, Madame Parmentier grew frightened. She began to think something had happened to her friends, to her father or mother...But she soon after heard that her old governess, whom she had not seen since her marriage, and who had gone back to Vienna to her family in Austria, had died that same night, and that before she died she had several times expressed regret that she had been separated from her dear pupil, for whom she had a warm attachment."

On page 56 of the same work, we read an account sent to Flammarion, of inexplicable noises occurring at the exact time of the death of someone who had promised to leave a sign of immortality:

"Cremieux said to me afterwards : ' I thank you, my friend, and when they shoot me I will come to your cell and give you proof of immortality.' On the morning of November 30th, at break of day, I was awakened suddenly by the noise of little taps upon my table. I turned over, the noise ceased, and I fell asleep again. Some moments after the taps were again audible. Then I jumped out of bed and stood fully awake before the table. The noise went on, and was resumed once or twice, just the same.  Every morning on getting up I had been in the habit of going, thanks to the complicity of a kind-hearted turnkey, into the cell of Gaston Cremieux, where he always had ready for me a cup of coffee. That day, as usual, I repaired to our rendezvous. Alas! there were great seals on the cell door, and I could see, by looking through the spy-hole...that my friend was not there. I had just made this terrible discovery when the kind turnkey, in tears, threw himself into my arms. ‘ They shot him this morning at daybreak’  he cried ; ‘but he died bravely.' " 

On page 58 of the same work, we read an account sent to Flammarion of someone suffering a seizure at the exact hour of her daughter Amelie's death (along with something harder to explain):

"Amelie had been in religion about three years, when one day my mother went up to the garret to look for something she was anxious to find. All at once she ran back to the salon uttering loud cries, and fell down unconscious. They flew to her help, lifted her up, and she came to herself, crying with sobs: 'Oh, it is horrible ! Amelie is dying — she is dead, for 1 have just heard her singing as only a person  who is dead could sing !'  And another nervous seizure again made her lose her senses. Half an hour after this, Colonel M. rushed like a madman into my grandfather's house, holding a despatch in his hand. The dispatch was from the Mother Superior of the convent at Strasbourg, and contained only these words : ' Come, your granddaughter very ill.’  The colonel took the first train, reached the convent, and heard that the Sister had died at three o’clock precisely, the hour of the nervous attack experienced by my mother.  This fact has been often told me by my mother, my grandmother, and my father, who were present, as well as my uncle and aunt, all of whom bear testimony that they had witnessed this strange incident.”

On page 62 of the same work, we read an account sent to Flammarion of someone getting a mysterious jolt at the hour of his brother's death:

"One morning my father-in-law, who was not in the least anxious about his brother, whom he believed to be in perfect health, was in bed. Before going out to visit his patients it was his custom to take a cup of coffee in bed. He was partaking of this little repast, and talking to his wife, who was sitting near him, when suddenly the bed under him received a shock so violent that he was thrown backward, and the cup of coffee he held in his hand was spilled. Later he found that at that very hour [his] brother had died in Algeria." 

On page 71 of the same work, we read an account of a man who said that on December 1, 1898 "I then had the presentiment that some misfortune was about to befall me, that some one was going to rob me, or to set the house on fire, or that a gendarme was coming to arrest me for some crime just committed, and so on." He checked his watch, and saw it was 9:30 PM.  The next day he learned that his uncle had died at 9:30 PM the previous day. 

On page 86 of the same work we read this account:

"One Monday, the day after one of these visits, when he had found the sick man apparently much better, my father and mother were both suddenly awakened by a violent blow struck on the head-board of their bed. ' What's the matter?' cried my mother, greatly terrified.  'Did you hear some one knocking on the bed ?' My father, not wishing to seem frightened, although he had been roused from his sleep by the same noise, got up, lit the lamp, and looked at the clock. ' Tiens!' he said. 'I have a presentiment. I think poor Fantrac is dead. He always told me he would warn me.' As soon as it was day my father set out for Granville. When he reached the hospital he asked to see, though it was so early, the man of the name of Fantrac. They told him he had died at two o'clock that morning, exactly the time when my father had been so suddenly awakened."

On page 91 a Marius Mariage tells of an incident that seems to have occurred on the same day his brother Jean died:

"The next day great was my stupefaction at seeing my sister, who then lived at Nantes, come in in a state of great excitement to tell me that about eleven o'clock she had heard a strange noise proceeding from her table, and, then being quite awake, a terrible commotion in her big closet. I then led her into the kitchen and said : ''Jean is dead.'  ' Yes,' she answered, ' it was he.’  A month later we learned that our dear Jean had died in hospital at Birkadere in Algeria, on the night of the 19th and 20th of May."  

On page 99 we read this account referring to Madeira, an island off of Portugal:

"In 1843 Madame Thayer, being in ill health, was sent to Madeira. Her father, General Bertrand, was at Chateauroux [France]....On reaching Chateauroux he was attacked by a congestion of the lungs, and died on the 29th of January. On the same day, January 29th, Madame Thayer...was quietly conversing, not thinking of any harm likely to happen to the dear ones she had left in France. Suddenly she turned pale, gave a scream, burst into tears, and cried, ‘Oh! my father is dead!’ Those present tried to calm her. They pointed out that her last letters were of recent date and had nothing but good news in them, and that there was no cause to anticipate misfortune. She  persisted in what she said, and noted down the day and hour...It took more than a month for letters from France to reach Madeira. The first mail that arrived brought news of the death of General Bertrand on January 19th, the very day and hour when his daughter had received her revelation." 

Houses in Madeira

On page 117 we read this account:

"At Annot (Basses Alpes), December 30, 1890, in the morning my mother when she got up said to me, ‘ I think a death has happened in our family. Last night at two o'clock I was awakened by sharp blows on the wall at the head of my bed. I was wide awake'...A letter also arrived on December 31, showing that my aunt, after an illness of several days, had died on the 30th of December, at two o'clock in the morning, the very hour when my mother had heard those blows struck near her as she lay upon her pillow. My mother had not known that my aunt was ill."

On page 147 we read this account submitted by an agriculture professor named H. Faber:

"My parents were one day summoned to the bedside of a neighbor who was dying. They went, and found themselves in the midst of a large circle of friends and neighbors who were awaiting the sad end in silence. Suddenly a clock upon the wall, which had not been running for years, gave forth most clear and startling sounds — ear-splitting sounds, like those struck by a human on an anvil. All present rose up in alarm. What did the strange noise mean? 'You may know what it means,'  said one of those present, meaning that death was about to claim the dying man, who drew his last breath shortly after."